America Is A Company — Solo Installation, Muzeo Museum & Cultural Center

America Is A Company was my first solo museum installation, presented at Muzeo Museum & Cultural Center in Anaheim from February 18 through April 8, 2023. The work takes salvaged corporate signage — logos and wordmarks pulled out of their original commercial context — and rebuilds them using traditional craft materials: stained glass, neon, hand-worked metal. Removed from advertising and put back together by hand, the same imagery that was built to sell something starts to say something else entirely. The installation is a body of work about labor, automation, and corporate decay, using the visual language of American branding against itself.

The installation included four pieces I keep coming back to as favorites from the show: -Real Hospital Bills A massive wall-sized piece spelling out real hospital bills — line items like a heart attack, chemotherapy, an emergency C-section, a single packaged cough drop — hand-built in neon, in red, white, and blue. Laid out like a receipt, the piece takes the actual, absurd price list of American healthcare and puts it directly on the wall as a critique of the industry itself. -Burning Greenhouse A greenhouse structure built from neon foliage, rigged with a motion sensor so that when someone walks in front of it, animated neon flames ignite across the roofline. The piece is about corporate destruction of the natural world, and the guilt that comes with it — the greenhouse (a symbol of growth and protection) catching fire the moment a person approaches, as if their presence itself is the trigger. -Luxury Car Crash A pair of wrecked luxury sports cars, rendered side by side in neon outline — one glowing red, one glowing teal, both with shattered windshields. The piece points at the disconnect between how casually some people can total a car worth more than someone else’s annual salary, and what that same amount of money means to everyone else. -Hologram Computer A vintage computer rendered in neon outline, its screen replaced with a rotating hologram-style display feeding the viewer a stream of junk advertising and patriotic imagery. The piece is about being served a constant feed of junk ads because you attention is the product itself.